Physics and Astronomy Colloquium
Tuesday, April 17, 2001, 4:10pm
Room 118 Physics-Astronomy Building
Refreshments at 3:45 pm in Room 224
Experimental Science at the Extremes: Scaling
Astrophysics into the Laboratory Using Intense Lasers
Bruce A. Remington
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Modern laser facilities offer new opportunities for pursuing experimental
science at the extremes. Compared to other areas of science, the field
of high energy density physics, emerging as a result of high power lasers,
is still in its infancy. Only a handful of lasers around the world are
operated as user facilities. Yet in the short time that such a capability
has been available, a user community has nucleated, and new regimes of
experimental science are emerging. I will review a selection of science
highlights that serve to illustrate the potential of this new field.
Examples of experiments done to probe the dynamics of core-collapse
supernovae, high Mach number protostellar jets, radiatively driven
molecular clouds, the interiors of the giant planets, and possibly
relativistic plasmas relevant to gamma-ray bursts, will be given.
Scaling - where it works and why - will also be discussed.
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